Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Boardgame Concept: Settlers of CaTron

I love Settlers of Catan. It uses simple yet amazingly clever and deep resource management mechanics to provide endless replayability. I was thrilled to get the Star Trek Catan version for my youngest son a couple Christmasses ago, and it got me to thinking about what other properties could be readily adapted to the Catan model.

Enter Disney's classic sci-fi flick, TRON.

Any geek who would subject themselves to reading this blog likely knows what Tron is all about, so I'm not going to belabor that point. Rather, let's get to the eye candy of my homebrewed adaptation of the Catan game to the Tron universe.

I give you:

To begin with, Catan uses five resources: Lumber, Sheep, Brick, Wheat, and Ore. My ideal version would replace those with:

Energy
(replaces Lumber)

Hex Tile:

Resource Card:

Bits

(replaces Sheep)

Hex Tile:

Resource Card:

Grid

(replaces Brick)

Hex Tile:

Resource Card:

RAM

(replaces Wheat)

Hex Tile:﻿

Resource Card:

Programs

(replaces Ore)

Hex Tile:﻿

Resource Card (I love this pic):

Once we have those five resources, we then have the pieces. My thought would be that these would be best done in transparent acrylic, the kind that really catches the light and glows at the edges.

Roads

The coolest and most logical choice for the roads would be Light Cycles with a section of wall behind them. Please forgive my line-drawings; I have next to no artistic ability.

Settlements

I have to admit that I wasn't sure what to do with these. For the moment, I'm calling them "Junctions" and they'll be just a six-pointed convergence of roads. I'm sure I can come up with something better, given the time and another viewing of Tron.

Cities

I knew exactly what I wanted with this one: the Input/Output Tower where Flynn, Tron, and Yori meet the grizzled old man-program. Here is the screenshot from the film:

The pieces would be something like that (again, please forgive my pathetic line drawings).

Thief

This one was a no-brainer! What better Thief marker than the ominous, red-glowing Recognizer? This baby would be beautiful in etched transparent red acrylic.

Development Cards.

In Catan, the five types of Development Cards are:

1. Year of Plenty

2. Monopoly

3. Road Builder

4. Knight

5. Victory Point

In CaTRON, I've envisioned those as such:

1. Data Dump

(replaces Year of Plenty)

2. Command Override
(replaces Monopoly)

3. Solar Sailer
(replaces Road Builder)

4. Video Warriors
(replaces Knight)

5. Victory Point

Then there are the two special achievement cards, Largest Army and Longest Road.

1. Largest Army

2. Longest Circuit

(replaces Longest Road)

And that's it. The game plays exactly the same as regular Catan. I hadn't gotten to the point of considering special characters, Seafarers, etc. This was enough fun for me on this topic.

The Deluxe Edition should have David Warner narrating the cards. If you're going to dream, might was well dream big, right?